Well, it certainly has been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been unemployed two months at this point and the initial rush of applications, resume re-makes and whatnot are complete and we are heading into the long slog known as summer, where job opportunities, already semi-scarce here in New Hampshire, really dry up. That’s not to say there’s nothing, but there’s certainly no low-hanging fruit.

I finally got my butt in gear on updating my Microsoft Certifications- no excuses there, just a reluctance to spend hours in my basement office reading prep books and building VM’s. Now I look at it as my job, since the actual job search takes me all of an hour a day unless I have interviews. I check Monster, JobsinNH, Career Builder and one or two other sites, e-mail off to anything that looks tempting and I’m done- so it’s back to the books.

Another possibility is some programming classes- that’s an admitted weak spot in the resume seeing as I have always been primarily a hardware and OS guy. I harbor no illusions about becoming a programmer, but a solid grounding in the basics seems like a damned good idea. That and working on my scripting- I was getting good at it when I was let go and simply haven’t practiced since then and that’s absolutely vital, so it’s VB and PowerShell scripting for me.

Last thing on the agenda is to write more. I can’t spend all my time with my nose buried in textbooks and the blogs have been fallow since THAT DAY. I see no reason not to indulge in more scribbling so both this site and Methuselah’s Daughter should see more action. Regarding Methuselah’s Daughter, I’m torn. Dean has expressed interest in starting book 2 and we’ve even exchanged some pretty good ideas on what form it should take and where it should lead, but neither of us has really written anything new of note. I find myself tempted to just stick to the blog and leave it at that, at least for the next few months.We’ll see.